Enjoy the guilty pleasures but not too much of them

ON long winter nights, I occasionally give myself pats of reassurance that my lifestyle is overall pretty good, apart from the few regular pints of Bud, a couple of steaks here and there, some crispy rasher sandwiches when the urge strikes me, the intermittent Curly-Wurly bar and a cup of strong tea before bedtime.

Oops, there and then, the realisation strikes that I’m a walking time-tomb and my great personal ambition of living forever is not going to be realised.

Come to think of it though, even if I never again have a pint of Budweiser or Guinness, or a sirloin steak, or a Curly Wurly, immortality may still prove to be a rather elusive ambition, so on balance the conclusion I’ve come to – within reason – is to enjoy a bit of life without turning into a total piss-head at the end of the bar annoying the heads of everyone else and looking like Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’, the infamous friend of former soccer star Paul Gascoigne.

If we were to believe every food scare that a certain section of the slightly more uppity English tabloids carried over the past decades, there wouldn’t be another pint drank, a morsel of white bread consumed, an egg cracked open at the breakfast table, a steak thrown onto the pan, a hearty fry consumed, a cup of strong tea drank, a block of cheese left on the table, or a sliver of butter let dribble down peacefully over a hot baked potato.

This is even before we go into the unquantifiable evil of the takeaways or pizzerias – absolute terrorists in terms of human survival – with hot dogs, double cheeseburgers, curried chips, deep fried chicken, kebabs and fully loaded pizzas all practically guaranteed to give the local undertaker plenty of business in the short to medium term. So we’re doomed if we do and doomed if we don’t.

Even last week, as I peeped into the fridge and admired a couple of chunky steaks, my moment of fleeting pleasure was interrupted by a radio report, spouting on about a World Health Organisation Report on the possibility that red meat could be carcinogenic . . . a possible cause of cancer. Strangely enough, I didn’t get any sudden urge to remove the steaks from the fridge and present them to my beloved Labrador, Sam, who would gladly have ignored any health warnings associated with the consumption of bovine products.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.